What's the difference between synchronicity and serendipity?
Traveling, as well as attempting to collectively manifest with companions, provides excellent opportunities to observe and experience the twin sister phenomena of synchronicity and serendipity.
On my recent trip to the Pacific Northwest, my friend Rob -- a Virgo blessedly balanced by a fun, boyish spirit and the confident traveler's intuition that comes from having banked heaps of skymiles -- remarked on how often things that we'd wished for out loud seemed to go our way.
Our Seattle host Chris sheds some serious go-with-the-Flow vibe as well, so the compound results made for a magical week:
- The food cravings we named would appear on the next menu posted in a restaurant window.
- Even the worst traffic jams resulted in some later perfect timing that could not have worked out better.
- Ubiquitous leaden skies and blankets of fog completely vanished just in time for that unscheduled trip up to the top the Space Needle.
- Gifts that seemed custom-made for friends and family back home were strewn along our path.
- Free street parking appeared less than two blocks away from the Tori Amos show at the Paramount Theater. (The photo above is of the ceiling over the stage.)
- The amazing mystery behind how we find, discover, and reconnect with great friends across decades and lifetimes was in undeniable evidence.
...There are other more powerful personal examples I can't blog about publicly, for any number of reasons, but you get the idea.
Rob kept finding more occasions than normal to use the words serendipity and synchronicity -- and being that these would certainly be among the fattest words in a Shift Your Spirits tag cloud -- he asked me:
How do you decide which word to use?
- synchronicity: The simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.
- serendipity: The occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.
Which is best when it's both serendipity and synchronicity at the same time?
Ah, semantic hair-splitting... I find that I tend to use one not long behind the other. I'm not sure if another such word already exists or not, but we just went ahead and made up a new one to serve our purposes.
- synchrodipity: The delightful unfolding of events or manifestation of intentions that seem to be evidence of a benevolent Universal Intelligence or the interconnectivity of all things. Also, the sense of well-being that results from the common experience of being in the Flow.
I hope you'll find many joyful occasions in your own life to call synchrodipitous.
